tripngroove

Thanks for your interest - it's been a lifelong pursuit. There was an old upright piano in the house while I was growing up that I always gravitated to. Had about 10 years of piano lessons as an adolescent; had a love/hate relationship with the structure of taking lessons but it was invaluable. Ended up playing tuba all through high school in various school bands, which got me in to playing electric bass in the school jazz band. Around this time someone gifted me an old electric guitar and I fell in love with that distorted feedback you get when you crank the volume and stand in front of the amp. Started a really bad high school rock band. This led to several more rock/emo bands over the years. Concurrently, a buddy in school gave me a pirated copy of Propellerhead Rebirth, which emulated several of Roland's old drum machines and groovebox-style synthesizers. Found this super interesting. Spent a lot of time in college making bad techno with Fruity Loops. Kind of gave it all a rest while I did startup life for a while... then I had the good fortune to be working out of a building near a recording studio and we sort of got to go hang out in there every so often. At some point, a band was set up in there and I laid eyes on an old Roland Juno-60. I was so intrigued I immediately bought one on craigslist and that has sent me down this enormous rabbit-hole of hardware synthesizers... which, to my eyes, is this wonderful center of the venn-diagram that intersects design and music and technology. Putting together a solo album has always been on my bucket list and this last year of isolation was the perfect opportunity... and here we are!

Of all the services I've had to interact with to get this album out digitally, Bandcamp was easily the most streamlined and easy to use. Definitely recommend them to anyone as a first-stop in getting music distributed.

Thanks!

This description is hilarious - I may have to blurb it for promotional material (if you don't mind)!

Thanks. I really struggled with mixing the guitar and so many layers of synth. At this point it is what it is but I am definitely iterating on my process for the next album.

Hey thanks!

I would love if you could say a little more here - what exactly do you mean by making the guitars less detached in the highs?

Currently iterating my creative process for the next album and one of my main areas of focus is creating a better strategy for constructing my mix. This album has many layers of synth parts and I found it nearly impossible to preserve all the detail I wanted.

I have been so pleasantly surprised at what a great adaptation the TV series has been so far.

Thank you! :D

Recently released my debut album, "The Good Ship Cacophony" as Space Pirates Guild. Heavy guitars, synths, drum machines.

- https://open.spotify.com/album/6YS0IJarvrzMtZzYMiN51z?si=GAI...

- https://soundcloud.com/spacepiratesguild

- https://spacepiratesguild.bandcamp.com/

- https://music.apple.com/us/album/the-good-ship-cacophony/154...

- https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_nC0XLATC5H8i...

Trivia: the new logo is called the "Bélo"; the old one was constructed from the typeface "Bello" by Underware.

http://www.underware.nl/fonts/bello/preface

I think you've touched on one big source of this problem, which is that many of these icons have been trademarked and saddled with all manner of usage restrictions and licenses.

As an entrepreneur or designer, am I going to waste who knows how much time interpreting the usage guidelines from Share This, or devote valuable space on my site to giving the Open Share people an attribution?

No. I'm going to spend 5 minutes designing something that won't cause future legal threats or trouble at acquisition time.

We need something with an MIT-like license on it.

I recently had this exact problem.

THE FIX: Log in to your Apple support profile, go to the devices section, then unregister all the iOS devices associated with your account.

Good! A person operating a moving vehicle should have 100% of their attention focused on the road. I have yet to see an argument to the contrary that doesn't attempt to rationalize unsafe behavior.

Any device that actively creates distractions occluding a person's field of vision should be prohibited while driving.

John Mayer speaking at Berklee College of Music had this to say on the subject:

> “The tweets are getting shorter, but the songs are still 4 minutes long. You’re coming up with 140-character zingers, and the song is still 4 minutes long…I realized about a year ago that I couldn’t have a complete thought anymore. And I was a tweetaholic. I had four million twitter followers, and I was always writing on it. And I stopped using twitter as an outlet and I started using twitter as the instrument to riff on, and it started to make my mind smaller and smaller and smaller. And I couldn’t write a song.”

http://www.berklee-blogs.com/2011/07/john-mayer-2011-clinic-...

> the 0.01% of the time where they are "activated", they do their job just fine.

Several homes I've lived in had smoke detectors that would false positive on a somewhat regular basis from (what I deduct were) sudden changes in humidity. This tends to happen in the middle of the night. Unfortunately, the only fix at times was to unplug the smoke detector and go back to bed. A "silence for 15 min" option, sensitivity adjustment, or any kind of interactive control would be amazing.

Also, who wouldn't want to get an alert if their house is burning down?

If Nest released this tomorrow I would replace every smoke detector in my house with one.

I propose that one factor exacerbating the negative feelings around this particular product launch is that Google has failed to create a good customer experience during purchase (particularly order confirmation).

People don't like to wait[1]. In a world where Amazon gets orders to a person the next day, a checkout flow that doesn't set extremely clear expectations for the timing of order processing, fulfillment, and shipping will make people angry. Google forced consumers to work particularly hard to find this information. Here's the confirmation email I received: http://i.imgur.com/CbMSu.png

I'd argue that the design of this email is particularly poor, in that the ONLY thing I care about at this point is: when will the thing I bought arrive at my house. Every single piece of information other than: what was purchased, when it will arrive, and the delivery address should be moved much lower in the information hierarchy.

Embarrassingly enough, I sent Google customer support frustrated complaint that I hadn't received a notice about an expected ship date, only to have them (rather mechanically) direct me back to this original email.

Apple still does a great job at this experience. When a brand new iPhone is taking a couple weeks to arrive, the folks I've witnessed are usually not angry - they're excited.

[1](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/opinion/sunday/why-waiting...)

For someone who's not familiar with the app, I have to do a lot of decoding of your home page to figure out what exactly the product is and why I should be interested.

Your /tour "Features" page explains it much better:

"TEAM INBOX & CHAT Replace IRC, IM or Skype chat with Flowdock."

That's something I can quickly parse and immediately understand.

I also echo the sentiment that more screenshots (hopefully with call-outs/highlights) would probably help out.

We used Lockitron at the Cloudkick office. Super convenient, as it let anyone at the office buzz a guest/delivery through our outer door without leaving their desk. Also awesome: the ability to give visitors temporary access without having to keep track of making keys, ensuring they're returned, blah blah blah. Lockitron eliminated the dumb, day-to-day-headache-type-stuff involved in getting people in and out of our space.

You can literally see the aforementioned concepts if you observe the visualizer.

Thank you for posting this; many of the original comments from this thread have been deleted, including the one Linus was responding to.

So, while I support the source's position, his post is misrepresenting the context of Linus' comment.

So much is dependent on the app. It's hard to discuss the iPad without tacitly including the entire associated software ecosystem (without really being conscious of the scope of that oversight).

I agree with your main point, and I have no doubt that as the medium continues to expand, the quality of the software and interaction will also grow.

Just curious, what visual design apps are you using / would you recommend?

As a visual designer, I have to disagree. Trying to work on an iPad is a complete waste of time. Sketching/prototyping by hand is orders of magnitude faster than on an iPad, and it wouldn't even be worth it to try to produce anything resembling deliverable work. The required depth of interaction, breadth of options, and fine-grain control just isn't there.

For musicians, I think it's a different story because the iPad usually augments an existing setup; it can be integrated with other devices to fill a specific need that can be solved by a touch interface into highly customized software. In this case, the iPad is actually allowing totally new interaction that wasn't possible before. This is much more useful than the visual designer's case, where previously established modes of interaction are simulated in an interface they weren't designed for.

The image in this post was stolen from "Rejected" - a short animated film by Don Hertzfeldt.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJYxCSXjhLI#t=4m45s

Just saw an awesome documentary on Anonymous at the Slamdance Film Festival (Sundance's indie younger sibling). Interesting and well made. Would recommend it for anyone who is interested in Anonymous/Hacktivism.

http://wearelegionthedocumentary.com/

Initially, I also thought the spiders were a bit too "human"... however, in thinking about the way Vinge portrays them, it was important for me to realize there's a point later in the story where he reveals that the focused translators are heavily anthropomorphizing everything they relate to the rest of the crew. I think this is a really strong suggestion that everything told from the point-of-view of the spiders is passing through the same narrator. There's a point where he specifically mentions that the translators seem to know about events and conversations they shouldn't, and we can infer this is because they've been covertly communicating with the Underhill for a long time and he's given them the back-story.

Also important, I think, is that a huge contributing factor to events and technologies developing similarly to those of human civilization, is that the humans were actively manipulating information and events on the planet from the moment they arrived.

I agree with you about Stephenson being fantastic; his books make you think. While I've enjoyed what I've read from Vinge, in some sense it feels much closer to the fantasy genre.

I'm curious as to what folks here thought of The Baroque Cycle. I loved Snow Crash, Diamond Age, and Anathem... but Quicksilver seemed to drag, and I didn't have the heart to pick up the next one in the series.

No worries :) Saw this on Reddit yesterday and spent an hour looking through the rest of the posts on the blog; some interesting graphic work curated there.

At least give credit where credit is due.

Source: http://designersgotoheaven.com/post/1242437663/changes-of-th...

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The section of the website in question is basically a colophon. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colophon_(publishing).

Including a colophon is a fairly common practice, especially in the world of print design, when a publication has been artfully assembled and polished by a professional designer. I hardly think it's fair to use this as a point of criticism; it just means they have a designer on staff who: a) might have a history in print design b) knows his typography c) was thinking about the culture of the business when making design decisions

It's no mistake that all the typefaces they've chosen have long, strong histories firmly rooted in England. They are Bulmer, Baskerville, and Underground (of London underground fame - most of us have seen the old signs from the subway).

Furthermore, wccrawford's earlier assertion that their name and typeface choice has nothing to do with the business is obtuse; if you check out http://quid.com/team.html, you'll notice that most of the hackers involved are either from, or studied in, England, which makes their branding choices eminently appropriate in the context of their shared history.

These guys are killing it. A variety of quality game content, bundled, cheap, and well marketed on the web, via platforms like steam and email (I open their newsletter every time it shows up, which says something about how they connected with me as a customer). Just when I was feeling that pc gaming was dead, this kind of distribution (steam especially) is reinvigorating the platform in a way that makes a lot of business sense.

Another great example: steam shows me a game that's 18 months old for 10% of the original retail price, I buy it on their platform and instantly download/install it on a whim and in one step, and I'm a happy customer. I never would have purchased it if they hadn't dumped it in my lap... but when I can get at least a few hours of (perhaps questionably good?) entertainment and new gaming experiences for the price of a pint or two of micro, that B-game I wouldn't otherwise have purchased starts to look more attractive.

This guy has done an admirable job of appropriating the visual style of Scott Hansen, of iso50.net / Tycho, who has been making design in a similar vein for many years.

Here are two designs I was immediately reminded of; both because of the style and, for these two in particular, the subject matter.

http://www.merchline.com/iso50/productdisplay.3969.p.htm / http://www.merchline.com/iso50/categorydisplay.2586.c.htm

I enjoy Scott's work and have purchased a few of his posters. This one is my favorites:

http://blog.iso50.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/iso50-north...

Even further back in the aesthetic pedigree of this work you'll note similarities to the work of Shepard Fairey, who created the OBEY giant phenomenon and, more recently, the iconic, 3-color HOPE poster for Obama's presidential campaign.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_Fairey